Assessment of Evidence in University Students' Scientific Writing

The purpose of the study presented in this paper is to examine uses of evidence inuniversity students' writing of scientific argument. The study was conducted in anintroductory level oceanography course in a large public university. In this course students draw on large-scale geological data sets provided by an interactive CD-ROM,`Our Dynamic Planet' (Prothero 1995), to write a scientific technical paper. We examined the uses of evidence in two ways. First, we conducted interviews with undergraduate oceanography students n = 9, non-oceanography undergraduate students n = 8 , and course instructors n = 4 to assess the differences in interpretation of uses of scientific evidence for high ranked and low ranked student papers from a previous academic year. Second, we applied our proposed argumentation analysis to student writing to examine the formulation of evidence in these high and low ranked papers. We draw on these findings to discuss ways of teaching students the construction of argument in scientific writing.